Book Review | How I Killed Pluto: Slipping Pluto a mickey

Sunday

Jan 30, 2011 at 12:01 AMJan 30, 2011 at 1:47 PM

Pluto - poor little guy. He never wanted much. The others could be bigger; they could be better-looking or brag about themselves ("I'm burning hot!" or "I have rings!" or "I support life!"). He didn't care. All he wanted was to be part of the planet club. And, for about 75 years, that tiny frozen world billions of miles from the sun was a card-carrying member.

Pluto - poor little guy. He never wanted much. The others could be bigger; they could be better-looking or brag about themselves ("I'm burning hot!" or "I have rings!" or "I support life!"). He didn't care. All he wanted was to be part of the planet club. And, for about 75 years, that tiny frozen world billions of miles from the sun was a card-carrying member.

Then, in 2006, Pluto was kicked out - reclassified as a dwarf planet.

The credit - or, for the outraged nine-planet fans, the blame - goes to the International Astronomical Union. It also goes to California Institute of Technology astronomer Mike Brown, who just couldn't help finding other tantalizing objects at the edge of the solar system that challenged Pluto's planetary status.

"I would hear from many people who were sad about Pluto," Brown writes in How I Killed Pluto: And Why It Had It Coming.

"And I understood. Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it."

Brown's book brims with humor and charm as he describes the thrill of the hunt that compensates for all the drudgery involved in astronomy.

Sure, he says, it's certainly easier today than in 1930, when another American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, found Pluto. But hunting for distant objects is still a painstaking process of sifting images, either with computers or a magnifying glass, to find that faint dot that is more than just a scratch on the lens. There are also plenty of long, tedious nights and a frustrating application process to use the mightiest telescopes on the ground and the Hubble Space Telescope overhead to confirm calculations.

Brown is a warm, generous guide, acknowledging the work of his colleagues - Chadwick Trujillo and David Rabinowitz - and also his readers' limitations, using language that's clear and simple. He includes touching glimpses of his marriage and the birth of his daughter that act as a nice counterpoint to the galactic story he's telling (during his courtship of his wife, Brown says, the many "no's" he experienced during the hunt were balanced by her "yes" to his proposal).

Don't assume, however, that the astronomy business is pure romance. There's plenty of professional jealousy and dishonesty: Brown describes how a Spanish scientist might have stolen the claim to one of his team's discoveries if there hadn't been a computer trail showing that the rival was spying on the telescope positions of Brown's team.

He also recounts the tortured collective decision-making of the International Astronomical Union during its 2006 meeting. It first proposed revising the solar system to include 12 planets, adding not only Eris, a distant body slightly larger than Pluto that Brown discovered, but also the asteroid Ceres and Pluto's moon Charon. The union then created a dwarf-planet category instead.

Brown had much to gain by the former idea - how cool is it to have "planet discoverer" on your resume? - but he says he was pleased by the union's decision because it "put a scientific foundation behind what most people think they mean when they say the word planet."

After Pluto's demotion, you might recall, one group wasn't pleased: astrologers. They got over it, though, and Pluto is still very important in the making of horoscopes. And, for $12, you can still buy a glow-in-the-dark, hanging mobile of the solar system for your kids that features the sun and nine planets.

But scientists such as Brown can't go along with fortunetellers or toymakers for a reason that's unavoidable: the Kuiper belt. Out there, starting beyond Neptune, are "vast numbers of small icy objects (that) circle the sun in cold storage" that are leftovers from the creation of the solar system. Pluto - along with Eris and other objects - are more rightly members of the Kuiper club, named for the astronomer who speculated about the belt's existence, Gerard Kuiper.

Brown's book is exhilarating for a simple reason: He directs our attention at something we never think about.

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